HDTVs Dive into Deep Color

LAS VEGAS -- Improvements to the guts of the High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) will deliver greater contrast and less banding on high-definition television and monitor screens at a lower cost, says HDMI maker Silicon Image. The company demonstrated its new "deep color" technology at the Consumer Electronics Show here this week.

"Most TVs have 8-bit color depth--17 million colors," says Joseph C. Lee, a Silicon Image product marketing director. "Ten-bit color depth has one billion colors. Twelve-bit is where most people can't detect a difference any more."

Silicon Image demonstrated deep color technology in a prototype DLP HDTV at CES, showing images with standard 8-bit color depth changing to 10-bit color depth. At the demo, differences in contrast appeared slight but perceptible. Gradually shaded images showed less marked banding in 10-bit than in 8-bit color depth. Product Marketing Director Stevan Eidson calls the look "snappier, much cleaner" than typical HD images.

More for Less

Less visible differences may slightly lower the price of upcoming HDTVs and high-end monitors. The deep color display chips rely on Silicon Image's new internal link technology, iTMDS. It takes its name from "internal" and from Transition-Minimized Differential Signaling, an older Silicon Image technology that serves as the basis for the common DVI and HDMI standards.

The deep color display interface chips delivering iTMDS use twice the bandwidth of comparable technologies, allowing HDTV and monitor makers to use fewer chips. "This will mean less cabling internally, which will save money," says Eidson. "It will probably save about $10 in manufacturing costs, which makes a difference of $30" in the stores.

HDTV prices have already tumbled recently, and intense competition continues to whittle down prices on large wide-screen monitors.

ITMDS technology will work with DLP, LCD, LCOS, and plasma screens--"anything digital," says Lee. He says that Samsung will release the first HDTV with this technology in March or April of 2006.

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